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Honoring the Memories

Twenty years later, those with the closest ties to 9/11 are still picking up the pieces.

By TCU Magazine

August 12^th, 2021

by Trisha Spence

Meredith Casimes was 15 months old when her father died. The TCU senior treasures his old college sweatshirts, and she wants you to remember him.

Madison Burnett ’18, who was 5 when her father died, cherishes the memory of dancing with him in the living room to Wynonna Judd music before bed. She wants you to remember him.

Both of their fathers died in 2001 during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Casimes’ father, Lt. Cmdr. David Williams, was working in the Naval Operations Division of the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 flew into the building.

Burnett’s father, Tom, and other passengers struggled to take back United Airlines Flight 93 from its hijackers. His flight crashed in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, instead of hitting the hijackers’ intended target.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the coordinated attacks that killed 2,977 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Shanksville. Each victim has family and friends who live with mourning, memories and mementos. For them, Sept. 11 is part of the present, not just the past.

Some current TCU students have lived entire lifetimes in a post-9/11 world of airport security, “support our troops” cheers and American flag lapel pins. Teaching them about the tragedy is a thorny task.

Sensitivity in Mind

Casimes, a strategic communication major who moved frequently while growing up, said classmates and teachers were often unaware of her 9/11 connection. Only on the anniversary would teachers talk about 9/11, Casimes said. The lesson usually included videos of the hijacked planes crashing into buildings. She asked to leave the room first.

“It’s traumatizing to look at that kind of thing,” she said.

Curby Alexander, associate professor of professional practice in the College of Education, prepares future educators to teach sensitive subjects like 9/11.

Since 2001, Meredith Casimes has had a photo of her dad on her nightstand, along with a model of the Pentagon. Photo by Mark Graham

“There are some ways you shouldn’t approach it. You shouldn’t re-create the horror,” he said. “You don’t know what your students have gone through. You don’t know what is going to cause trauma. … Even if you’re trained to teach history, you’re not a trained counselor.”

Alexander also advises against oversimplifying or relying on a textbook as the only source. Creating simulations or games like those played to mimic the Oregon Trail or World War II battles also dehumanize that day, he said.

“It reinforces that we’re dealing with unnamed people in unvisited places and that this was an event no different than what happened in the Avengers,” Alexander said.

Instead, focus on the emotional aspects of 9/11, Casimes said. “It’s not just that it was this huge domestic terrorist attack. These people had lives: They were people, they had families, they had a life and a future ahead of them. They weren’t just a number. They were more than that.”

“The grief was very real,” Burnett said. “And the sadness was very real, too.”

Burnett said she wants students in classrooms learning about 9/11 to hear more than casualty counts or a timeline of that Tuesday morning.

“I would want to ensure that we have the whole picture of what all happened,” she said, “to fully account for the actions of people on that day: for the firefighters who ran into the burning buildings, for the men and women who fought back against terrorists, for the personal stories that thousands of people have in saying goodbye to their loved ones and never being able to hug them again.”

Madison Burnett, left, with sisters Halley and Anna Clare and their parents, Tom and Deena. Madison was 5 when her father died. Courtesy of Madison Burnett

“These people had lives: They were people, they had families, they had a life and a future ahead of them.”

Madison Burnett treasures her father's college sweatshirt. “On the anniversary [of 9/11], there is a sincere feeling of gratitude as well as hope and reflecting on the past," she said. Photo by Mark Graham

Meredith Casimes keeps her father's Navy shirt. Casimes was 15 months old when her father died on 9/11. "Every age group was affected from 9/11," she said. Photo by Mark Graham

History Firsthand

On Sept. 12, 2001, Todd Kerstetter, professor of history, asked students to keep a scrapbook. He said he wanted them to evaluate the information they consumed.

His former student Sheena Kenady Richardson ’05 kept a paper that had been taped on a building’s door to announce class cancellations and newspaper articles sorting out the confusion. Richardson, now a sixth grade math teacher in Buda, Texas, emailed Kerstetter on the 18th anniversary of 9/11 to tell him she still had the project.

Alexander said he encourages future teachers to include primary sources, like guest speakers, in lesson plans. Hearing firsthand accounts brings reality to the classroom.

Burnett was well-known in Little Rock, Arkansas, where her mother moved the family in summer 2002. Burnett and her sisters were pegged “the 9/11 kids” and invited to share their experience at school and in front of other groups.

Rather than read from a textbook, teachers “shifted instead to us to share our personal experience so that others could learn what that was like,” she said. “They would look to me and want to know what 9/11 looks like.”

“The responsibility of it was grave and one that I took seriously,” Burnett said.

Madison Burnett's father, Tom, is hailed as an American hero. "Oftentimes now, there is just a pride as well as thanksgiving for the men and women who stood up against the terrorists of that day," she said. Photo by Mark Graham

She would tell listeners that on that morning, the Burnett girls were sitting at the kitchen table in their San Ramon, California, home, about to eat breakfast. Their mother, Deena, started receiving phone calls from loved ones asking about Tom. She rifled through papers looking for her husband’s flight number. Then the phone rang again.

Deena, a former flight attendant, received three phone calls from her husband aboard Flight 93.

“It was clear from my mother’s expression that there was something gravely wrong. I remember that she began to weep,” Burnett said. “She began crying and just didn’t stop crying.”

Burnett and her sisters went to a friend’s house. When they returned that evening, the house was full of flowers, gifts, food, friends and strangers. Deena led her daughters upstairs to tell them that bad people had made their dad’s airplane crash, and he had died. Just outside, Burnett saw neighbors forming a human wall to prevent people from approaching the house.

Burnett’s mother was crucial in helping the government piece together what happened on the plane.

“What sets Flight 93 apart from some of the other experiences that people had on 9/11 is that there was this call to action and this display of heroic virtue in light of the darkness,” Burnett said.

Tom Burnett is hailed as an American hero.

“Whenever I think about the important aspects of teaching on 9/11, I want to hold to the truth and also include the emotional memory of people,” Madison Burnett said. “I don’t think that we can ever read about 9/11 and fully capture the impression it made upon not only the individuals who had a personal loss, but also just on us as a nation, too. It touched every American life.

“We really can’t glean that from a textbook,” she said. “You also have to have a dimension in learning about a person’s lived experience.”

Madison Burnett, foreground, with mother Deena and sisters Halley and Anna Clare. Deena received three calls from her husband before Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania. Photo by Mark Graham

“I don’t think that we can ever read about 9/11 and fully capture the impression it made upon not only the individuals who had a personal loss, but also just on us as a nation.”

Ripple Effects

The onus on educators and historians is twofold, Alexander said: “It’s to preserve that memory in a way that honors the people who were affected and to extract from those events the underlying principles, events and historical context that created the conditions for it to happen.”

“The responsibility I feel for filling in the gap is showing people the emotional connection that I have to it and showing people that other people were affected by 9/11, not just the people who died,” Casimes said. “It had a ripple effect.”

Amanda Gore Stallings ’97 (MLA ’01) lived close enough to the Pentagon to see the shadow from Flight 77’s wing. She heard the crash that killed Casimes’ father and 183 others.

Bridges closed, phone lines were clogged, and Stallings, now associate vice chancellor for TCU Alumni Relations, said a sense of patriotism took over. “That was palpable. You could feel it. You were proud of it.”

Post-9/11, U.S. troops increased in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, the Department of Defense reports U.S. military casualties totaled 2,312 between October 2001 and May 2021. Lance Cpl. Benjamin Schmidt was one of them.

On his third tour as a U.S. Marine, his second in Afghanistan, Schmidt, on hiatus from his studies at TCU, marked the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with a Facebook post.

“I guess you can use today as a reason for us to be here in Afghanistan. Just know I’m fighting for myself, but most of all for all my friends and family who read this,” he wrote. “Everyone, it’s an honor to be your ambassador.”

Before one tour, the aspiring history professor packed a book about the 80-year British occupancy of Afghanistan.

“Several times he expressed the futility of our presence in Afghanistan,” said Dr. David Schmidt, the Marine’s father. “I think he probably struggled with it.”

Brown University has counted more than 71,000 civilian deaths in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001.

“The extremism of either side of anything is very difficult to deal with,” said Fort Worth firefighter Kenny Dean. “Whether it’s in politics or religion or racial matters … it still circles back to some understanding and tolerance.”

Benjamin Schmidt left TCU to enlist in the U.S. Marines. He had planned to return to school and become a history professor. Courtesy of David Schmidt

Dean, a rescue specialist with Texas A&M Task Force 1, worked night shifts at ground zero cutting steel beams to be hauled out. Very little was recognizable, he said, such as a fork he found rolled up into a ball.

“When we consider how we should uphold the memories of 9/11 and how we should have them all come together and synthesize to tell the grand story of how this left an impression on the American mind and heart, we need to be very mindful of not having just a one-sided story,” Burnett said.

But understanding and processing weren’t on Dean’s mind until months later, he said. They couldn’t be or he’d lose focus on his task, even when it included stepping aside to let a separate crew remove human remains from the wreckage.

Kenny Dean, third from left, a Fort Worth firefighter, was part of Texas A&M Task Force 1. He cut through steel at ground zero as his team worked through the night to clear the rubble of the twin towers. Courtesy of Shelda Dean

“You have to turn your feelings off to do your job, to understand your purpose,” said Dean, whose wife, Shelda, works in marketing for TCU’s Mary Couts Burnett Library.

Schmidt also had a job to do in Afghanistan. “He was very professional,” his father said, “but anybody who is fairly well-educated was questioning what, in the grand scheme of things, are we going to accomplish.”

Schmidt was 14 on 9/11, but his motivation for enlisting was discipline, his father said, to turn around his dismal GPA and penchant for parties and return to TCU.

Before Schmidt deployed, he gave his father conditions for the distribution of his life insurance money. He wanted half to establish a scholarship at TCU for history graduate students.

David Schmidt, right, remembers his son Benjamin as an outdoorsman. The two went fly-fishing between tours, traveled to Glacier National Park and hunted together in West Texas. Courtesy of David Schmidt

Though Schmidt, who died at 24, never fulfilled his dream of being a history professor, his family made sure his name would stand at the front of TCU classrooms. The family raised a million dollars to endow the LCpl Benjamin Whetstone Schmidt Endowed Professor of War, Conflict, and Society in 20th-Century America, currently held by Kara Dixon Vuic.

To commemorate the anniversary of 9/11, students place U.S. flags in the Campus Commons lawn. In 2014, Madison Burnett's first year at TCU and away from her family, she helped place the 2,977 flags — one for each life lost on 9/11. Photo by Amy Peterson

Remembering

In 2014 as a first-year student at TCU, Burnett was alone on the anniversary of her father’s death. No one knew her as a 9/11 kid. While walking to class, she saw students poking small U.S. flags into the grass by Frog Fountain, one for each person who died in the attacks.

“I asked if I could join,” she said. “I laid out the flags with them. … They didn’t know how personal it was to me.”

When Williams died, he had two daughters and a son on the way. Casimes’ mother frequently brought the children to Arlington National Cemetery, making a point of associating the cemetery — and later the Pentagon memorial — with their “dad in heaven.” The kids decorated the headstone with stickers.

Finding Williams’ name at the National September 11 Memorial in New York City was a joyous moment, Casimes said. Her family inserted an American flag into the inscribed name.

Meredith Casimes, second from left, sits with family on her father’s bench at the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial. Courtesy of Meredith Casimes

“It makes me curious what people think when they see everyone’s names,” she said. “Do they think, ‘Oh my God, so sad, this is a person who died,’ or do they think, ‘I wonder what this person’s story was?’ ”

Casimes and Burnett remember their fathers for who they were as people. Casimes and her family drink her father’s favorite 7-Eleven Slurpee on his birthday. In the Burnett house, the horn line in Wynonna Judd’s “I Can’t Wait to Meet You” and chorus of little girl giggles endure on video and in memory.

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